Looking for a game that exercises your creativity, visual recognition and storytelling plus will have you roaring with laughter? You’ve found it in RoarStack, where you connect the many things you can see in inkblots to extend a group story while potentially scoring points. It is a game which draws on your visual creativity and storytelling in new ways. You will be surprised and amused by how everyone sees something different and how quickly stories can change direction. Most card games focus on points and/or characters generally with beautiful graphics to help guide you. RoarStack is coloring outside the normal lines; it is based on stories around abstract art inkblots, which only have the meanings you give them; It is up to you to see something related to the story. It is a game where unexpected and sometimes insightful outcomes are to be expected. Further down in the page is a link where you can go to get a free sample print and play deck.
In most other card games, the difference between victory and defeat is mostly in the cards and their probabilities; your creativity and the story are secondary. But in RoarStack you have to be creative in what you see and connecting it to the story. There aren’t obvious items on the cards, only artwork that you need to interpret in context. It’s up to the players to decide how to interpret their cards and build on the previous one, which means that every game tells unique stories based on the collective creativity of everyone involved.
Let’s give you an example so you can see how many different things are in the cards. Look at the images above. Now think about animals and look around in the card. What else can you see? Can you see part of a frog? (Hint, it’s white). Now think about westerns while still taking about animals. Anything? Maybe you can see a chihuahua with pistols on the left, or maybe its cat ready for a fight. If you are looking for people, maybe you will see a surprised person with a big hairdo (bottom left) or two faces arguing loudly (brown regions in the middle of the right card). What people see depends on their thoughs and viewpoint — it is really hard to see the chihuahua on the right version of the card even when you’ve already seen it.
There is some hard science behind RoarStack and why/how you see different things. The human brain often finds connections because of priming After 30 min of using Roarstack, more than 75% of the students felt they could learn to be more creative . There was also a statistically very significant (p=0.0001) improvement in students feeling of personal creativity. Moreover, when it comes to actual problem-solving, over 60 % of the students felt Roarstack could help them be more creative in problem-solving. From an instructors point of view, the teams came up with significantly more creative yet potentially viable solutions. It is probably also worth mentioning that on a scale of 1-5 on “fun to play” with 1 being the best, more than 60% of the class graded Roarstack as a 1 or 2. SThe graph below shows the same impact whith corporate professionals. So if you parent/grandparent looking fun but educational give, or if you are an educator or a company leader looking to improve your teams’ creative and problem-solving skills, Roarstack is a fun way to get them going on a new creative path toward innovation.
The Many Modes of Play Though we provide multiple potential rule sets to get you going, Roarstack is about your creativity, so the rules are also flexible. Our website will have a section for user variations — so if you develop a good new way to use them let us know.
Themes are optional but can constrain the allowed stories in any mode. Constraints can be general e.g. stories about animals, or specific relations, e.g. your character must defeat the previous character, or your character must help the previous character toward some common goal. In the expansion theme deck we’ll provide some fun themes to use.
Story Play: The Simplest RoarStack game, for casual group play or children, is Story Play, wherein you relate your card to the previously played card, possibly within the optional theme of the round. In Story Play, the added sayings and card value/suits don’t matter, just the inkblots and the laughter. This is a good mode for young children and people more interested in collaboration and storytelling than competition. You can still have competition by making each card’s interaction a battle, and declare a winner based on who uses all their cards first.
Point Play: If you want to keep score and compete with others, then you can do add the dimension of point play where victory points are scored based on phrase+value on the story cards, when the conversation of the group matches the phrase. You play your victory cards at any time. Victory points can come from mundane things in the conversation from the weather to social relations to pop culture. Your inkblots and storytelling can help lead the conversation, but you don’t score victory points from what you do/say, only from what your friends do/say. This mode encourages talking with and listening to your friends and is great for party play. Even when its not your turn to play a card, you need to pay attention and engage in dialog, maybe even trying to guide the conversation so you can score points. However, you also have to be active in the round to score so you have to keep that story going when its your turn.. Victory scoring is generally simple — you play the victory card in front of you so just count them at the end of the round. You can still have a lot of fun even with victory points even if you forget scoring — winning is not as important as the fun of the creative story process and good conversation. Note some of the cards engage everyone.
Speed play : A mode good for larger groups or big/noisy parties is speed mode where everyone tries to extend the story. In this mode the gestour starts a story and everyone picks a card and tries to be the best continuation of that story based on the inkblot on their card. There is an optional 30 second free-for-all period where everyone talks at once and people try to convince others that theirs is the best story. The gestour then begins calling on players who have 10 seconds to tell their card’s story. The gestour picks the best answer and that person becomes the new gestour. Everyone else draws a replacement card. First person out of cards wins the hand.
Twisted Play: Another mode of play is twisted play, which is good for people who play traditional card games. In Twisted play, you use just the playing card deck, and play your favorite classic card game, with a twist — you can use the inkblots to connect cards or as wild cards. For example, in roaring rummy you might connect a random card into a part of a straight by telling the inkblots’ secret stories and connecting misfit cards to those before and after it in sequence. In roaring go fish, when you pull a card from the pool you can also match it if you can tell the story to connect it to your matching card. In Solitary stories you can play any card anywhere, if you can tell its story. Here, the role of the stories is to directly help you score points in a classic game. These add RoarStack story play to existing games, making almost any card wild by using your creativity. It adds a new twist and often a lot more laughter, to well-known games.
Ideation Play: Another mode of play is ideation — the generation of ideas related to solving a problem. Here, the player(s) takes a problem to be solved and uses the cards to help explore the problem, the constraints, and potential solutions. RoarStack is not only a fun game; it can also be an innovation tool for improving creativity and problem-solving. Creativity in innovation and problem-solving is often about linking disparate ideas together. Given a topic people see different things in the cards, and seeing things in the cards makes connections to other ideas. In the words of the very innovative Steve Jobs : “Creativity is just connecting things.”
Reviews Over the past year the game has undergone multiple formal testing rounds as well as been reviewed by students and experts. After testing at UCCS, it was then evaluated at SaltCon14 where the feedback was that the art was excellent and the game play was fun but mate a bit to complex — so we added simpler initial rule sets such as basic story play. In the second and more formal tested at UCCS, in a class that had not self-selected to play, more than 60% of the class graded Roarstack as a 1 or 2, and more than 85% rated it a 3 or better on a scale of 1 (best) to 5. Like any game, its not for quite everyone, some people really don’t want to be creative and others don’t like talking with others.
It has also been evaluated by innovation experts. Drew Boyd, Co-author of “Inside the Box: A Proven Method of Creativity for Breakthrough Results ” (Simon & Schuster, 2013) had this to say in his review:
“Roar Stack is a game with huge potential. I love the multiple ways it can be played, but I am most interested in how the cards can be used as a corporate innovation tool. The Roar Stack cards break the mold of traditional creativity tools. They can help people solve problems by making connections in unconventional ways.”
There is also a Bower's Game Corners' independent video review of Roarstack's Kickstarter preview deck on Youtube. (Just type in Roarstack and find it and all our other videos.)
Background on the team and game idea As some background to this game, the developers are part of a unique family of degrees, the Bachelor of Innovation at the University of Colorado Colorado Springs. We have all taken/taught courses in innovation processes and regularly have classes that include ideation and creativity elements. The student team developed RoarStack as part of a Global Game Jam with the theme: “We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are.” Since then the team has aggressively developed and test iterations. Its been play tested by students, faculty, family and friends. Taking the game to Kickstarter and launching the company is par for the course in a BI student’s education — many of our fellow game students and other innovation students are already in their own startups.
The game had a successful Kickstarter campaign raising more than $2600 in pre-publicaiton sales. We can be found in stores in Colorado Springs, but for those in other cities, buy it here at DriveThruCards (which is where we get them printed for our sales!).
© 2014, 2015, RoarStack
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